The daughter to the late Michael Jackson is speaking up about what she identifies as, leading her to trend online.
In a Rolling Stone interview, Paris Jackson said she considers herself to be a Black woman.
“[Michael] would look me in the eyes and he’d point his finger at me and he’d be like, ‘You’re black. Be proud of your roots.’”
Paris, 25, is the firstborn child to Michael Jackson who he shares with Debbie Rowe. She was born in 1998 and has since gone on to make her mark in the entertainment industry.
As Michael Jackson’s fame grew in the 80s, fan began to notice his skin was visibly lighter. The Rock With You star later came out to say that he suffered from vitiligo, an autoimmune disorder causing patches of skin to lose color.
In the Rolling Stone interview, Paris Jackson further revealed that in her conversation with her father about her Black roots: “I’d be like, ‘OK, he’s my dad, why would he lie to me?’ So I just believe what he told me. ‘Cause, to my knowledge, he’s never lied to me.”
She further discussed that her lighter skin has led some to believe that she is “from Finland or something,” but she is a Black woman, she said, adding that there are a plethora of over people of mixed race who look like her. One of them being actor Wentworth Miller, who was born to a Black father and white mother.
In F. James Davis 1991 book Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition, he writes:
“It should now be apparent that the definition of a black person as one with any trace at all of black African ancestry is inextricably woven into the history of the United States. It incorporates beliefs once used to justify slavery and later used to buttress the castelike Jim Crow system of segregation. Developed in the South, the definition of “Negro” (now black) spread and became the nation’s social and legal definition. Because blacks are defined according to the one-drop rule, they are a socially constructed category in which there is wide variation in racial traits and therefore not a race group in the scientific sense. However, because that category has a definite status position in the society it has become a self-conscious social group with an ethnic identity.”
